Made to Measure Blog
‘Would not recommend’: Why Net Promoter Score is dangerous
Would you recommend our company to a friend or colleague? This innocent-sounding question has spawned a multi-billion dollar measurement industry. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become the default measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty for most major corporations. Two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies use it. There’s just one small problem – it doesn’t work.…
6 Disadvantages of a Balanced Scorecard
The balanced scorecard (BSC) has been a buzzword in performance management since Kaplan and Norton introduced it in the ’90s. But is it as flawless as it seems? Before making it part of your performance measurement and strategic plan, let’s check out some surprising downsides you need to know. 6 Biggest Disadvantages of Balanced Scorecards:…
5 Advantages of a Balanced Scorecard
Developed in the early ’90s by American management consultants David Norton and Robert Kaplan, the balanced scorecard (BSC) has quickly become a go-to tool for performance measurement and strategic planning. In fact, around half of Fortune 1000 companies in the USA and 40% of large European firms now rely on it (Source: Bernard Marr). At its…
How to Get Staff Buy-In for KPIs in 5 Steps
Let’s be honest-talking about ‘KPI buy-in’ might be a bit of a stretch at first. In most cases, when you’re rolling out key metrics, what you’re really aiming for is to avoid resistance and persuade people to comply with gathering the data. Truly getting employee buy-in usually only happens once people start seeing the actual…
Building a KPI Habit
Why a KPI habit is essential A KPI that is never reviewed or acted upon might as well not exist. Worse than that, an unreviewed KPI is a kind of ‘tax’ on the organisation, a costly piece of information that was never looked at or acted upon. Forming a ‘KPI habit’, particularly for short-term KPIs,…
Teaching to the test
Benjamin Wann Guest author Teaching to the test On October 19, 2009, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke a story with the provocative title “Are Drastic Swings in CRCT Scores Valid?” The CRCT acronym referred to the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, which were, as the article specified, “Georgia’s main measure of academic ability through eighth grade.” The report…
Keeping Score & Rats in Hanoi
Benjamin Wann Guest author Keeping Score “If a strategy is to be achieved, it must be publicly tracked, measured, and monitored. If you are trying to lose weight, you must get on the scales regularly.” -David Maister “What Gets Measured, Gets Done.” -Unknown Think about the last time you watched a casual game of pickup…
ROKS in the wild…
Teradata like the ROKS KPI Canvas… It looks like Dan Simerlink, of Teradata Business Value Consulting, read KPI Checklists and really liked the KPI definition template I shared, check out page 8 of his PDF white-paper below. Click on the image to download the original PDF.
Your strategic objectives are probably not unique. That’s a good thing
It’s always said that there are two things that everyone thinks they possess – good driving ability and a sense of humour. I’d like to add one more to that list – thinking ‘their business is unique’. After a frightening number of hours running KPI selection workshops, I realised I had a problem. To build…
How to avoid this common Excel disaster…
On 4 January 2010, in the Marriott hotel in Atlanta, two giants in the world of economics, Prof Carmen Reinhart and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Ken Rogoff, were presenting their research paper, ‘Growth in a Time of Debt’. Their message from their research turned the heads of global leaders and pushed…